From the desk of Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga pens her first fashion column for V Magazine, admitting 'I can look at almost any hemline, silhouette, beadwork or heel architecture and tell you precisely who designed it first.'

BY Melissa Whitworth |
13 May 2011

Lady Gaga for V Magazine by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.

Lady Gaga for V Magazine by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.

Lady Gaga's inaugural fashion column, for this month's
V Magazine
, comes in the form of a memo addressed to Stephen Gan (the magazine's editor in chief), Nicola Formichetti (aka "Mr Gaga"), Little Monsters, Andy Warhol, The New York Public Library, bullies and fashion-sexuals. The latter term must be for those who exhibit the highest level of fashion love, eclipsing the word "fashionista".

"I myself can look at almost any hemline, silhouette, beadwork or heel architecture and tell you precisely who designed it first, what French painter they stole it from, how many designers reinvented them and what cultural and musical movement parented the birth, death and resurrection of that particular trend," she writes.

Impressive... to the point of being worthy of a curator position at the Metropolitan Museum's hallowed Costume Institute.

Before she was famous, living in her tiny Lower East Side studio apartment she surrounded herself, she says, with fashion inspiration. She dreamed of being a "rock star who dressed like Mark Bolan, walked like Jerry Hall, had the panache of Ginger from
Casino
and the mystery of Isabella Blow."

She describes how Picasso and Matisse engaged in a "bitchy queen fight" for two decades and ponders who out there (apart from her) knows when Yves Saint Laurent designed his "Mondrian" dress which appeared in his autumn/winter 1965 collection.

And finally she explains the genesis of the alien pod she arrived at the Grammy's in. It was a Hussein Chalayan "vessel" inspired by a chicken. "It was taken from an egg", intended to "reinterpret the meaning of birth and rebirth."

"The past undergoes mitosis becoming the originality of the future." Gaga admits she never leaves the house without her library card. Who knew?

Of the Mondrian dress, she asked her hairdresser what Yves Saint Laurent might have thought of her using his collection for inspiration. "You could ask Nan Kempner, but she's dead," replies the hairdresser. And if you don't get that joke, you can't call yourself a "fashion sexual."